=Bright Pictures.=--Whatever may be thought of the work of those painters who are called "impressionists," it must be recognized that they have taught us how some things may be possible. And the present quality of brightness will necessarily be to a certain extent a permanent one in art. For like it or not as we may, it is true--true to a certain great, fundamental characteristic of nature. For outdoor light _is bright_, even on a gray day. The luminosity of color is too great to be represented with dark paint or lifeless color. And once this fact is recognized, it is a fact which will inevitably influence all kinds of work. What is possible and right at a certain stage of knowledge or recognition may be impossible when other points of view have once been accepted. We see only what we look for, and we look for only what we expect to see or are interested to see. You cannot go out-of-doors now and paint as you would have painted a hundred years ago. Then you would have painted what you saw then; but you would not have seen nor looked for things which you cannot help seeing now. For our eyes have been opened to new qualities and new facts, and once the eyes have been opened to them they can never be closed to them again.
=Average Observation.=--I say we see only what we look for, what we expect to find; anything out of the ordinary is hard to believe at first. In looking at nature the average observer does not even see the obvious. Certain general facts he accepts in the general, but as a rule there is no real recognition of what is there; no perception of the relations of things; no analysis; no real _seeing_, only a conventional acceptance of a thing as a _thing_. Men look at nature with one idea, and at a picture of nature with an entirely different idea. Nature in the picture is to most people just what they have been accustomed to see in other pictures. They get their idea of how nature looks from those pictures, and if you show them a picture differently conceived they have difficulty in taking it in.
For this reason the "bright picture" does not "look right." I remember being asked by a man in a modern exhibition what I thought of "these bright pictures." When I asked which pictures he had reference to, I found that he meant the work of a man whose whole aim in painting landscape was, as he once said to me, to get "the just note" in color and value. One would think that the fact that the whole force of an extremely able and sincere mind was directed to that purpose, would produce a picture with at least truth of observation. Yet this was not what my passing acquaintance wanted to see. The picture he liked, which "had some nature in it," as he pointed out to me, was an extremely commonplace landscape with a black tree against a garish sky, reflected in a pool of water. The "bright picture" seemed to me exquisitely gray and quiet, though high in key, and the one with "nature in it," harsh and crude, but conventional; and that was just the point. The average observer wants to see, and does see, in nature what he is accustomed to accept in a picture as nature.